visible in these stories.
Every now and then it is ignored, as in the case of the old friends
found among the "little people" by the Manx farmer. Less startling than
these, but quite as much in point, are the women, like some already
mentioned, who are carried off into Fairyland, where they become wives
and mothers. They can never come back to their old life, though they
retain enough of the "mortal mixture" to require the adventurous human
midwife to relieve their pains. Accordingly, we need not be surprised if
the same incidents of story or fibres of superstition attach at one time
to ghosts and at another to the non-human creatures of imagination, or
if Hades and Fairyland are often confounded. Both are equally the realm
of the supernatural. We may therefore inquire whether eating is
forbidden to the chance sojourner in the place of the dead equally as to
the sojourner in Fairyland, if he wish to return to the upper air. And
we shall find that it is.

Proserpine ate seven grains of a pomegranate which grew in the Elysian
Fields, and so was compelled to remain in the Shades, the wife of "the
grisly king." Thus, too, when Morgan the Fay takes measures to get Ogier
the Dane into her power she causes him to be shipwrecked on a loadstone
rock near to Avalon. Escaping from the sea, he comes to an orchard, and
there eats an apple which, it is not too much to say, seals his fate.
Again, when Thomas of Erceldoune is being led down by the Fairy Queen
into her realm, he desires to eat of the fruit of certain trees.

"He presed to pul the frute with his honde,
As man for fode was nyhonde feynte;
She seid, Thomas, lat them stande,
Or ellis the fiend will the ateynte.
If thou pulle the sothe to sey,
Thi soule goeth to the fyre of hell
Hit cummes never out til doomsday,
But ther ever in payne to dwelle."

An old story preserved for us by Saxo Grammaticus describes the visit of
some Danish heroes to Guthmund, a giant who rules a delightful land
beyond a certain river crossed by a golden bridge. Thorkill, their
conductor, a Scandinavian Ulysses for cunning, warns his companions of
the various temptations that will be set before them. They must forbear
the food of the country, and be satisfied with that which they had
brought with them; moreover, they must keep apart from the natives,
taking care not so much as to touch them. In spite, however, of
Thorkill's warnings to them, and his excuses in the